S.B. Master is an American branding executive and entrepreneur. She is the founder of the San Francisco-based naming firms Master-McNeil and Naming Matters.[1][2][3]
S.B. Master | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater | University of California, Santa Cruz Harvard Business School |
| Occupation(s) | Branding executive Entrepreneur |
| Board member of | San Francisco Center for the Book UC Santa Cruz (trustee) |
| Website | www |
Career
editLandor Associates, Wordmark
editIn 1980, after earning a BA from UC Santa Cruz and an MBA from the Harvard Business School,[4] Master began her career at Landor Associates, an identity consulting firm. She worked closely with the agency's founder, Walter Landor.[5]
In 1985 Master launched the Landor verbal branding division, Wordmark. As Wordmark's president, she named Walt Disney's new production company Touchstone Pictures, created Westin Hotels for Western International Hotels, and renamed Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Pacific Telesis.[6] Described by the Washington Post as the "enfant terrible" of the naming business, she viewed the practice of using "some weird name that no one can say" to name companies as "littering the American landscape with garbage words."[7][8]
Master-McNeil, Naming Matters
editIn 1989, Master founded Master-McNeil, one of the first companies to focus exclusively on naming and naming architecture. She added the fictitious "McNeil" to the firm's name because it led potential clients to assume that the company was "big and important."[1] In the first five years of its existence, Master-McNeil named several hundred products and companies, including PayPal[4] and more than 50 Apple products.[6]
In 2017, Master founded Naming Matters, a self-service platform that applies natural language processing, machine learning, big data, and data visualization algorithms to suggest and compare brand names based on characteristics including phonetic similarity, similarity of goods, and status of existing trademark applications and registrations.[9][10]
References
edit- ^ a b Beato, G. (September 30, 1998). "Buy Any Other Name". Mother Jones. Retrieved 18 March 2017.
- ^ Loizos, Connie (March 8, 2017). "A new, affordable naming startup for startups". Tech Crunch. Retrieved 18 March 2017.
- ^ HOROVITZ, BRUCE (1990-01-23). "Sometimes, What's Not in a Company's Name Is What Really Counts". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved 2018-05-10.
- ^ a b Soni, Jimmy (2022). The founders : the story of PayPal and the entrepreneurs who shaped Silicon Valley. New York, NY. p. 87. ISBN 978-1-5011-9726-0. OCLC 1162986521.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ Kaplan, Wendy (2011). California Design, 1930–1965: "Living in a Modern Way". Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262298094.
- ^ a b Calvo, Dana S. (4 September 1994). "It May be the Name Game, but They're All Business". New York Times. Retrieved 2018-05-10.
- ^ Oldenberg, Don (May 22, 1987). "PLAYING THE CORPORATE NAME-CHANGE GAME". Washington Post. Retrieved 18 March 2017.
- ^ MASTER, S. B. (1987-03-15). "Name Changes That Fracture Language : Many Firms' New Monikers Are Utter Gibberish (Editorial)". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved 2018-05-10.
- ^ "A Safer—and Speedier—Way to Name Your Startup - Alumni - Harvard Business School". www.alumni.hbs.edu. December 2017. Retrieved 2018-05-10.
- ^ "San Francisco's Naming Matters wants to help founders around the world with the daunting process of naming startups". SmartCompany. 2017-03-22. Retrieved 2020-01-05.